by Jen Nadol
“How the fuck do you know all this stuff?” Moose asked, incredulous.
“Was Galen Riddock with you?”
Moose smirked. “Hell, no. I just put it under his name ’cause he’s an asshole.”
“Uh-huh.” I was starting to understand why the police always seemed like they didn’t know what they were doing. It was mind-boggling trying to put all the pieces of this stuff together. “So the Miloseviches live near the Clearys, right?”
Moose looked over his shoulder, turning away again. “Yeah.” He hefted his bucket onto table one.
I leaned against the next booth and took a shot in the dark, “I’ve heard they were really pissed at Mr. Cleary.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” Moose said, not looking up.
“But you still went there. To him. After.”
He turned to face me then, taking a step closer. His jaw was clenched. “Listen. I don’t know where you get off playing Mr. Righteous or the Hardy Boys here, but what I do or don’t do is none of your business. If you’re dancing around whether I had anything to do with your friend’s shithead dad getting killed, the answer is no. Neither did Jessica’s parents. The Miloseviches,” he added, glaring at me. “So Fuck. Off.”
Moose whirled back to his silverware, knocking the rolls he’d already done onto the floor. He cursed and kicked the leg of the table.
I decided to take his suggestion, making myself scarce for the rest of the shift. But it wasn’t Jessica Milosevich’s parents I was thinking about. It was Richie.
***
After work I swung by the track to get Tannis so we could meet everyone over at Trip’s to talk about Nat’s dad. Our Saturday night command performance. She was still racing laps, so I stood by the chain-link fence, watching the blue Thunderbird fly around the loop.
“Well, well,” a deep voice said from behind me. “Riley Larkin.”
I turned to see Tannis’s brother striding across the gravel lot. “Hey, Jed.” I shook the hand he offered, forcing myself not to wince. “I never got to tell you how much we enjoyed kicking your butt at the Dash.” He squeezed harder, smiling when I yelped. I rubbed my hand gingerly when he finally let go. “What are you still doing here? I didn’t know the marines gave so much vacation.”
Jed nodded, the blond hair he’d always worn shaggy when he lived here now buzz-cut, military style. “They usually don’t,” he said shortly.
I nodded toward Tannis, who’d pulled over by the pole and was out of the car, talking to her dad. “She ready for the race tomorrow?”
“I guess.” He shrugged. “My dad says her times have been off. And she’s been acting weird. Weirder than usual, I mean.”
“How so?”
“I dunno.” Jed leaned over and spit something onto the dirt. “Crying and shit. Freaking out if I move her bag from one place to another. Just . . . weird.”
“Well, it’s been a weird few weeks here.”
“You can say that again. Crazy shit about Randall Cleary, huh?”
Tannis’s dad climbed behind the wheel and drove slowly toward the garages. Tannis pulled off her helmet, shaking her blonde hair and seeing me and Jed for the first time. She waved. “Be there in a few, Ri,” she yelled. “I’m just gonna change up quick.”
“’Kay!” I yelled back.
As she disappeared down the grandstand tunnel, I could feel Jed eyeing me.
“What?”
“Dude. Are you dating my sister?”
“No!” I squawked. “I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with her or whatever. I’m just giving her a ride.”
I cringed, but Jed ignored the obvious joke. “Okay, man.” He smirked. “But if you’re the reason she’s acting like a freak, I’m gonna kick your ass, ’cause it’s making life hell.”
“Seriously, Jed.”
“Hey.” He held up his hands, grinning. “None of my business, you know?” He smirked again. “Gonna go help out the old man.”
Jed hoisted himself over the fence easily, tall and athletic, like Tannis and the rest of their family.
He’d reached the track’s infield when Tannis reappeared, looking . . . well, shinier than usual. Jed saw her and turned back to me, still close enough that I could see his self-satisfied expression. “Yep,” he called. “Have fun tonight, friend.”
Tannis paused when she reached him, talked for a few seconds, then gave him a playful shove before continuing my way. She was wearing her usual ripped and faded Levi’s, but some kind of silky shirt instead of the sweatshirts and fleeces I was used to seeing her in. And makeup.
“You finally do the wash?” I asked when she got to the dirt lot where I was waiting by my car.
“What?” She looked down at herself, plucking the shirt. “You mean this?”
“It’s rather, uh, feminine for you,” I said.
“I am a girl, Riley.” She thrust out her chest, adding archly, “In case you haven’t noticed.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” I said, feeling heat on my cheeks. I opened my door so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
Tannis grinned at my embarrassment, yanking open the passenger side and sliding in. “Anyway, you don’t wash silk, dumbass.”
“Wow. And a domestic goddess, too. What a wife you’ll make someday,” I said as I started driving, and then realized immediately that if Jed were right and Tannis liked me, that’d be a really uncomfortable thing to say. I changed the subject. “You ready for tomorrow?”
Tannis frowned. “I guess.” She seemed like she was going to say more, but rolled down the window instead.
“D’you mind?” I said, glancing over. “It’s, like, twenty degrees out.”
“Sorry,” she said, not rolling it up. “I’m feeling a little queasy.”
“You need me to pull over?”
She didn’t answer. I slowed down. But then she shook her head. “No, I’m good.” She rolled up the window.
“You sure?”
She nodded, and I hit the gas. Jed was right. She was acting weird.
“Jed’s been back for a while, huh?”
“Yeah.”
I pulled onto the bypass road toward Trip’s. “Doesn’t he have a wife and, like, a job down in Virginia?”
“I guess his job’s flexible. And his wife’s a bitch. She’s probably why he’s here so much.”
“Oh.”
“I wonder about that, you know?” Tannis said, obviously feeling better. “How people wind up with other people who seem like, just, the wrong match for them.”
“Uh . . .” Where was this going? Her and Matty? I’d seen them talking in the halls a few times, and I’d always felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, seeing two separate worlds colliding.
But instead she said, “Like Trip and Sarah.” That caught me off guard, but then Tannis added what I prayed she didn’t know and would never say. “I know you want her, Riley.”
My breath caught, and I felt hot, my palms and armpits sweaty. I pretended I hadn’t heard, frowning at the radio, changing the station.
“You get all awkward when she’s around.”
I scowled at Tannis. “I do not.”
“You do,” she said. “Don’t worry, She probably doesn’t notice because you’re always that way with her.”
I flicked on my turn signal, nearing Trip’s house. I was itching to tell her Sarah probably noticed everything, and, oh, by the way, she hadn’t seemed to think I was awkward when we’d kissed. Though it was plenty awkward after that. “She’s Trip’s girlfriend,” I said instead.
“Yup,” Tannis said softly. “That she is.”
We drove silently for a minute through the dark fields, the grass flat and barren in the sweep of the headlights. This was my least favorite time of year, everything dying and dull, not the bright greens of summer or the clean whit
e of the snow. Just dead broken stalks of corn and browning brush.
Once when I was fourteen, my mom surprised me with tickets to a Red Sox game. Play-offs, no less. We escaped the house like that a lot then. It was this same time of year, but riding the train, it seemed like the closer we sped toward the city, the more alive things were, till we sat staring at the vibrant green infield of Fenway Park. We lingered after the game, getting food in a diner nearby, even trading our train tickets for a later ride home. “It’d be fun to live somewhere like that, wouldn’t it?” she asked when we finally boarded our train after eleven.
I nodded, feeling a flutter of excitement through my sleepiness.
“Maybe someday we will,” she said thoughtfully.
We never went back, though. Never talked about it again. Not after her visits to Dr. Williams became routine.
“Do you really think Trip’s all that into her?” Tannis asked as we turned onto his street.
Trip and Sarah had been going out for over a year now. At first he’d told me everything. More than I wanted to know, really. How far he’d gotten with her. What she’d done to him the first night they’d hooked up. I don’t know why I was his confidant. Maybe because I was so much less experienced than his football pals and it was safe to tell me stuff. Or because I’d been there when he’d decided to ask her out. After a while he stopped talking about that stuff. Then other things followed. College. Plans for next year. It was funny, because there’d been plenty of days in our lifetime of friendship when I’d wished Trip would just shut up. But once he did, I realized I missed it. Just like I’d missed him those first years of high school when he’d cut me loose. Not that I’d ever tell him any of that.
I parked, looking up the path at Trip’s lit house and wondering if Tannis was into Trip or just sticking her nose into my business. I decided I didn’t really care. I had enough other things to worry about. “Yeah,” I finally answered, opening the door. “I do.”
Tannis nodded. “Sucks to be you, huh?” She climbed out of the car and jogged to the door without waiting for me.
***
“I think we should list out what we know,” Trip said when we were all in the basement with the door shut. Trip’s mom was puttering around upstairs; his dad was “out.” I tried not to think about where. “Sarah’s going to whiteboard it,” Trip said, motioning to an easel he’d set up.
“You’re so professional,” Tannis commented.
Trip ignored her and looked at Natalie, sitting on the couch, John Peters beside her. “Are you okay with that, Nat?”
She nodded, looking decidedly not okay.
“So,” he said. “Suspects.” Trip watched while Sarah wrote the heading on the board. “Galen Riddock,” he said. “We know he was a customer, but he says he wasn’t there that night.”
“Even though he stole and pawned my mom’s vase,” Natalie said.
“But the handwriting didn’t match,” John reminded her.
“I can explain that,” I said. Everyone turned to me.
“You can?” Nat said. “How?”
I hesitated, looking at John. “I know who took it and pawned it, but if I say, it has to stay between us. For now at least.” Moose had been so honestly freaked-out by my accusations, I really felt like he’d been telling the truth. Not that I could know for sure. But I didn’t want to be the one to turn his probation into something much worse over his vindictive act of stealing the vase.
“I don’t know that we can promise that,” Trip said finally, reading John’s and Natalie’s reactions. “Not without knowing what you’re going to say.”
“Someone admitted to me that he was there that night and took it. He pawned it under Galen’s name because Galen’s an ass. It was a prank.”
Trip frowned. “Why’d he take it? And why was he—your mystery man—there that night at all?”
“I—” I hesitated, realizing Moose hadn’t explained why he’d gone there. Had it been to buy drugs? Or something else? I figured he owed me, he’d said. For what? Jessica Milosevich’s death? “I don’t know, actually,” I admitted, wondering whether I was wrong to trust the things Moose had said.
“Can you just tell us, Riley?” Natalie asked. “Maybe if we know who it is, we can help figure out if it means anything.”
And coming from her, it made up my mind, because, honestly, who did I owe more to . . . Moose or Natalie? So I told.
“Do you want to tell about the lighter, too?” Sarah prompted as she wrote his name on the whiteboard. I sighed, explaining what we’d found, but Natalie stopped me a sentence in.
“When was this?”
I looked at her, realizing suddenly that we’d never told her we’d gone back. Thankfully, Sarah took over, addressing Nat directly.
“We went to your house, Natalie. Riley and I. And mapped the . . .” She hesitated, obviously choosing words carefully. “The living room, the scene.”
John raised his eyebrows. “Like forensics?”
Sarah nodded. “We’ve been studying it in physics. We thought it might help. I’m sorry, Nat.” She winced. “I hope you’re not mad.”
Nat shrugged noncommittally, but was obviously not happy. “So, what about the lighter?”
I finished, explaining how I’d found it and why it mattered. John spoke up immediately. “There’s no way the police would have missed that,” he said.
None of us spoke, uncomfortable telling a cop’s son the things we’d been saying among ourselves, but he got it.
“Listen, I know the police here don’t process scenes like this often, and maybe you think they bungled it, and maybe in some ways they did. But think about it,” he said, addressing me and Sarah particularly. “You were there, you did the forensics work too, so you know how painstaking it is and how carefully the whole area is looked at. Do you honestly think they’d have overlooked a lighter lying on top of the blood they were examining?”
No. I didn’t. “Maybe someone planted it there afterward,” I suggested.
“Who?” Tannis said.
“What about Richie Milosevich?” I could see all of their eyes widen. I went through all the connections—Moose’s visits to the Miloseviches’ house, how Richie had been the first to point the finger at Galen, the stuff about his sister and how his family had felt after. I had myself convinced by the end, until John said,
“That all makes sense except for one thing.”
“What?”
“He and his parents have a rock-solid alibi for Dash weekend. They weren’t even in town.”
Sarah crossed the freshly written name off her whiteboard, leaving just Moose and Galen.
“And Moose swears he didn’t do it. I think he’s telling the truth. Plus, he’s too short,” I reminded her.
She nodded and crossed him off too.
“Wait,” John said frowning. “What was that?”
Sarah told him what we’d come up with at the trailer.
John shook his head. “Something’s not making sense here,” he said. “I’m pretty sure my dad said it was just the opposite. They were looking for someone short.”
“Well, that would really narrow the suspects,” Tannis said. “Maybe you guys did it wrong.”
“Sarah got it dead-on in class,” I said defensively.
“No pun intended,” Trip said.
Nat looked like she’d had just about enough.
“It’s possible,” I said. “I think we were careful . . .” I glanced at Sarah, who nodded. “But we’re obviously far from experts.”
“So where does that leave us?” Tannis asked, exasperated.
“Pretty much where the police are,” John suggested wryly. “Without a clue.”
CHAPTER 26
“HOW MUCH LONGER?” NATALIE ASKED. She was sitting beside John Peters, huddled under a wool blanket. We’d come out to see Tan
nis’s race, the last one of the season. The cars were all lined up, Tannis’s father and brothers standing in the pits. I saw Jed hopping around, trying to stay warm.
“They should have gone by now,” Trip said, glancing at the big clock. “If I’d known we’d be sitting out here for an hour, I’d have brought some beers and a cooler.”
“You mean a heater,” I said.
“Yeah, that, too.”
The forecast had said it was supposed to hit forty, but sitting on the metal bleachers at the racetrack, it felt about twenty degrees colder. I could see my breath, and kicked myself for forgetting gloves.
I had a blanket all to myself, though. The fifth wheel. Nat and John. Trip and Sarah. Me.
“Look!” Natalie said, pointing to the track lights that finally turned on, signaling red to the drivers at starting positions. At the same time the loudspeaker announced the start of the race.
“Finally,” Sarah said. She was sitting at the other end of the bleachers. I’d let them settle in first before choosing the farthest seat away. I wondered if she’d noticed.
The track lights changed to yellow, then green. The cars took off in clouds of dust and a roar of engines.
We could see right away it wasn’t going to go well for Tannis.
I’d been to a handful of her races before, plus seen her practicing at the track, but I’d never seen her driving like she was here. She completely miscalculated the first curve, turning late, then swerving hard left and almost skidding out.
“Jeez,” Trip said. “What is she doing?”
She made it around the next lap okay, but you could see that her timing was off, her accelerations erratic. Twice she almost bumped into other cars, and edged away at the last second, seemingly more by luck than intent.
“She’s usually better than this, isn’t she?” John asked, turning to me. He’d never been to a race, but it was pretty obvious this wasn’t how you won them, and everyone knew Tannis had plenty of trophies to show for her time at the track.
“Yeah,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sarah biting her lip. Nat’s hands were clenched tight. I think we all felt that way, hanging on to the hope that Tannis would somehow pull it together in the remaining seven laps.